Heh. Here in California there is a bridge between Oakland and San Francisco
(known, rather obviously, as the Oakland - San Francisco Bay Bridge).

Some months back they had to close it for a day.

The normal drive from Oakland to San Francisco over the bridge is about 10
miles and in usual traffic takes 20 min or so.

While the bridge was closed the trip became roughly 110 miles and 3 hours.

And then there is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel on the East Coast. A 20
or so mile beast. There are major storms in that channel every year (we call
them 'hurricanes') and almost invariably a shipping barge gets pushed into
the bridge, "taking out" a hundred feet or so, necessitating a repair that
can literally take weeks.

That changes the 30 minute drive from the southern end of the DelMarVa Peninsula
to Virginia Beach (Hampton Roads, VA) into a 6 to 8 hour fiasco involving
Washington DC and the infamous Beltway and worse.

It's not so bad now that they have actually built a parallel bridge, with
each being one way. But there have been at least two instances where *both*
spans have been damaged in the same storm. See previous paragraph.

This makes traffic re-routing in California's Bay Area look like "heaven
on earth" in comparison.

Back in the '70s when I was last in Germany a 1 liter stein at the beer hall
was one Deutschmark, which was (back then) 26 cents American. Oh yeah, you
weren't buying the stein. You were buying the beer with which it was full.

Pour another round of drinks, I've got a "me and the lads down the pub came
up with this theory"

So we know that the Sun is made of hydrogen, right? And that it creates
energy via a fusion reaction that converts hydrogen into helium, this much
is pretty much agreed on, not just by scientists but by "scientists" as well.

This got me thinking.

All that hydrogen being converted into helium ... eventually the Sun is going
to have so much helium that it's going to just FLOAT AWAY. Just like a party
balloon. Are we prepared for that? Or maybe it's started happening already,
which is why we had such a cold winter last year? I just came back from a
great vacation at the beach, and I'm concerned that we won't be able to do
that again if the Sun floats away.